Glory and the Lightning (42 page)

His condescensions are warmer than the sun, sweeter

Than the light of Artemis. His soul is resplendent

As is his face, and his heart is wrought of courage.

Athens shall revere her son, and the ages will bless him.

When it was given to Pericles he hid his face in his hands and could only murmur, “Alas, alas, it is I who am nothing, and not Ichthus.”

CHAPTER 6

Agariste said to her son with that haughty sternness which she had adopted towards him during the past years, for she feared that he found her less than interesting since the death of Xanthippus: “You are of an age to marry and beget sons in your father’s memory.”

Pericles was invariably kind and courteous to his mother but he no longer took her seriously. “Alas,” he said, “I might beget only daughters.”

Agariste refused to recognize this lightness and said, “I have in mind my beloved niece, Dejanira.”

Pericles did not have to pretend disbelief and aversion. “Dejanira! The widow of Hipponicus? She is older than I. She is at least twenty-six, and has a son, Callias—”

“Surnamed ‘The Rich.’” said Agariste. “Riches are not to be despised, for all we are aristocrats.”

They were sitting in the outdoor portico which overlooked Athens floating in the warm rosy light of approaching sunset. The distant hills were jade and lavender and some were silvery, and held Athens as in an enameled bowl.

“You are jesting, my mother,” said Pericles who was clad only in a short tunic because of the heat. He crossed his long white legs and surveyed his mother with what he hoped was indulgent affection. “Not only is Dejanira older than I, a widow with a son, but she is stupid and ugly, short and fat, and has a face like a pouting sow. Her voice is like the string of a lyre which is out of tune, shrill and twanging, and to hear her speak is an assault on the ears. Certainly you are jesting.”

Agariste’s face, still severely beautiful and august, flushed with anger.

“You prefer your hetaira, that ignoble and shameless woman who is a physician?”

“She is at least intelligent and lovely to behold, my Helena, and she is my own age and has a merry tongue, while Dejanira’s conversation, like Medusa’s head, can turn anyone to stone out of sheer fatigue. When she is not complaining she is whimpering, and when doing neither she is eating or sleeping. Moreover, she sweats and smells and not even the attar of roses which she so lavishly uses can obliterate it. Does she not ever bathe? Her garments, too, swell over her body as over a keg, as if she were perpetually pregnant, and her peploses and tunics, though costly, appear to be the clothing of a slave girl who works in the fields, and they are stained. She also waddles.”

He stood up as if to dismiss the conversation as absurd. He even laughed a little and twinkled at his mother. But Agariste had the persistence of a bee lured by a dish of honey and the more she was resisted the more stubborn she became. “Your remarks are obscene, my son,” she said, “and revolting, and unworthy of an aristocratic man. Does appearance seem to you of the utmost importance?”

“You have always said, Mother, that appearance is most important, yet now you imply it is not.” He was becoming slightly irascible not only because of Dejanira but because he was afraid to annoy his mother too much, for had not his beloved Helena said that her heart was affected, as was evident to Helena by Agariste’s new bluish pallor and the throbbing of vessels in her long white throat when she was in the least agitated? Pericles loved his mother still, though of late she was making him increasingly irritable with her pretensions and arrogance. Too, he was a notable soldier but he was becoming involved in politics in which he was not as yet notably successful.

Agariste said, ignoring her son’s last remark, “You forget that her father is an Archon of Athens at this time and can be of invaluable assistance to you.”

Pericles regarded his mother in silence. He was somewhat surprised as he always was when she revealed a sharp shrewdness concerning the ambitions and the thoughts of others. At these times he was reminded that his mother might be a fool in some respects, and utter absurdities, but she also had a mind and was intelligent. He had not as yet informed her that politics attracted him immensely, yet in some way she knew, though he had not confided his intentions to anyone else, with the exception of Anaxagoras, whom his mother loathed.

“He must have bribed well to be elected,” he said.

“My brother would bribe no one!” cried Agariste, turning very pale and trembling. “We are of an honorable house!”

“Even aristocrats love power, and their second love is money, however vulgar that appears, and they will use the second for the first without hesitation.” But he hardly believed that the Archon, who was a proud and repellently virtuous man, had bought votes. He would use influence, yes, to procure what he wished, but gross gold never, not truly because he despised money but because influence was more dainty and did not publicly smell. Moreover, influence could not be traced, a fact which the prudent Archon must have considered long and carefully. Pericles had never liked his uncle and Xanthippus had detested him and had often mimicked him for the entertainment of Pericles.

Agariste was protesting Pericles’ observation about his uncle but Pericles did not listen. He was thinking; he made wry mouths. Was the abominable Dejanira his rapid path in the steaming fields of politics? He shuddered at the thought of her, but Pericles was inordinately ambitious. He reviled the Ecclesia for their oppressiveness, their stultifying of Athens, their crass and degenerate democracy. He believed that, in politics, he could affect the liberation of Athens and her new empire, make her great and free her for mighty things. At times he felt he could actually feel her throbbing but stifled heart under his feet; he yearned to give it room for expansion, for glory. The military man had little influence over the government. A man of resolution, determined that his loved country would spread shining wings over the world, had one access to the needed power: politics. Even the profound Anaxagoras had so admitted, with sadness, while deploring the fact.

Can I endure Dejanira even for Athens? he thought, and he knew the answer. He could avoid her bed, but this would anger her father. But how could he father her children when she was so repulsive to him and even to impoverished aristocrats who needed money? I should have to stuff my nostrils with lint, he reflected, when I would bed her. What of the sons I would beget on her? Would they resemble pigs, as does their mother? Is Athens worth such sons? Alas, he already knew the answer. Athens was worth anything a man could offer her, his adored country; any sacrifice would be as nothing. His stomach turned, but he said to his mother, “Let me consider it. Perhaps you could induce her to wash, my mother, and reduce her stink, at least for the wedding night.”

“Your remark is not only disgusting, it is unkind,” said Agariste. But she knew she had won, and she smiled her frigid but delicate smile. “Dejanira is a healthy young woman and you are not accustomed to the fragrance of health. You prefer the odors of closed chambers where you and your companions drown yourselves in wines and garlic and romp with lewd women. Such as your Helena, who has no respect for her sex but must engage in the abattoirs of surgeons and dabble in filth and forget that she is a woman.”

Pericles laughed. “I have not observed that she ever forgets she is a woman,” he said, and Agariste blushed at the implications of this and averted her head as if to avoid seeing something unspeakably lascivious. She lifted her hand to protect herself from any further mention of Helena, a gesture which Pericles found not only annoying but affected. Helena was like a rose that bloomed ebulliently and lustily and she was as candid as any unsophisticated youth for all her intellect and humor and sometimes bitter understanding of mankind. Robust, tall and somewhat plump, Helena was to Pericles a young Hera but without Hera’s petulances and jealousies. Her laugh was loud and strong, and she loved a jest more than anything else, and did not pretend horror at a rude joke fresh from the military camps. Rather, she enjoyed it and would add an epigram to it besides.

I can forget Dejanira in Helena’s arms, thought Pericles, smiling fondly, though Helena is owned by no man and is herself only and her bed is available to me seldom.

Agariste was acutely watching her son. How like a young Apollo he is! she thought. Despite that towering brow, which is somewhat grotesque and overshadows his perfect features, he is the handsomest man in Athens and his profile implies potency as well as thought. Who can compare with my son? His future is assured. Dejanira resembles a daughter of Erisichthon, who ate his own flesh out of his insatiable greed for food, and does not Dejanira adore the table as the altar to her fat body? This is true, but she is very rich and my brother is powerful and will help Pericles. Dejanira will not distress him overmuch, for men are men and seek their consolations among many women. Beauty is not necessary in a wife and is not much esteemed after a few years by a husband, for men grow accustomed to wives and desert them, no matter how lovely. Did not my husband prefer a hetaira to me?

Zeno of Elea had retired to his small estate, and thankfully. His place in the life of Pericles was taken by Anaxagoras as a companion and a very dear friend, and from Anaxagoras Pericles learned much asceticism and the ability at all times to maintain a personal dignity even under intense provocation. Anaxagoras was born in Clazomenae, ten years before the birth of Pericles, and at this time was some thirty-three years old. He had arrived in Athens from Asia Minor only a year ago, lured to the Grecian city by its culture and its fame as the home of philosophers, though the latter were rapidly becoming the victims of the Ecclesia, which was increasingly more ruthless and cruel in its persecution and extermination of all who disagreed with it.

Anaxagoras was a tall and slender man with an elongated and serious face, a very sensitive mouth, and a thin long nose with a sharp tip. His brow was smooth and invariably calm, his cheekbones distinct and broad, and above them was a pair of the largest and bluest eyes Pericles had ever seen, radiant with intellect and a magnificent sense of the ridiculous. Though middle-aged, he walked with the awkward grace of youth. His gestures were disciplined but eloquent. His dark hair seemed painted on his fragile skull and his ears, though unusually large, were translucent, so that they appeared rosy against the natural paleness of his complexion.

His fame as a mathematician and astronomer had reached Athens long before he arrived there, and he was received with accolades and affection from his Athenian colleagues, even if the never-sleeping Ecclesia was able to restrain its enthusiasm without much difficulty. So he came under its stringent eye because of his scientific knowledge and teachings and writings. Contrary to the convictions of the Ecclesia, whose ideas of Deity were extremely limited, fixed and dogmatic, and therefore all the more vehement and passionate, Anaxagoras was guilty of posing questions, advancing dubious hypotheses and drawing unorthodox conclusions. His one fault was his impatience with fools, unlike the gentle Zeno who only pitied them, and he could be abrupt with asininity no matter the source, and would remove himself without apology. He was particularly, and bitterly, incensed that the Ecclesia, once a noble body representative of the voting citizenry, as established by Solon, had become a quarrelsome and ignoble body of inquisitors, open to any public or private accusation against disliked figures. While containing few priests it was more or less dominated by them and was in fear of their alleged thaumaturgy and their intimacy with the gods. “Liberty,” he would say, “is the most desirable possession of man, followed only by knowledge and wisdom which cannot exist without freedom. But liberty, unless safeguarded by an unchanging Constitution, can become the tool of tyrants who use their own liberty to destroy that of others.”

Many of the Ecclesia were ignorant men whose only claim to pride was that they were freemen and voting citizens of Athens, and that they were pious conformists. When Anaxagoras, introducing his scientific method, declared he could predict eclipses, and that eclipses were not a sudden whim of the gods, the Ecclesia were horrified, and debated whether or not to pronounce the curses “against those who would deceive the people.” Anaxagoras had not been in Athens two years before the debate began. “It is well to be prudent,” said Pericles to him at one time. “Prudence,” said Anaxagoras, “is the last refuge of the coward. Though,” he added, seeing Pericles’ youthful smile, “it is a virtue in the brave man. I do not speak in paradoxes, as does your late teacher, Zeno, for science does not recognize paradoxes as a characteristic of Deity but as a natural problem that challenges and can hold a solution which can explain that no paradoxes exist at all but churn only in the minds of uninformed men. Pious marvellings have no place in the realm of science, but only facts.”

“There is still the mystery of man,” said Pericles.

“Then let us ponder it and perhaps reach an explanation,” said his friend. Like all scientists he was certain that there are no mysteries and that by the employment of scientific exploration the veils would fall one by one. In a way he was a dogmatist himself, and this Pericles understood. If Anaxagoras had any weakness at all it was his insistence that the scientific method, and scientists, would prevent chaos. Despite all opposition he did introduce scientific inquiry to Athens from Ionia, and was later to influence Socrates.

He believed that the body of knowledge was already complete but that in some degenerate manner man had lost the ability to penetrate far into it. “So you do believe in Deity, which has held this body of knowledge for the use of man,” said Pericles. At this question the blue eyes of Anaxagoras became grave. “A scientist who is not aware of the Anima Mundi is as petty as the Ecclesia, itself, and can hardly be called a learned man,” he replied.

His marvellings over what he discovered, he would say, was at the wonders which research revealed, and their perfection. “No man should approach science without a spirit of reverence, for without reverence there is only arrogance and vainglory and conceit, and these destroy the true soul of scientific inquiry.” At each new discovery he was exalted. There was a gentleness in him also, and he pitied humanity and was charity itself. Pericles considered him the most magnanimous and wisest of men and he had the strongest influence over the younger man, and was the only one who even neared true excellence.